Cube: Dark Ascension – Black

Dark Ascension brought some solid black cards into the mix, so the inclusions are likely easy to deduce. I’m continuing to remove some of the old creatures with shadow. Overall I think shadow isn’t very interactive, so I’m shaking things up a little and phasing shadow out for a while. I may bring them back if they are missed or needed, but for now I’m pulling most out.

If I was wanting to push mono-black in my cube, I’d likely keep Nantuko Shade while adding Geralf’s Messenger. But, since Winston drafting seems to be the primary way I draft my cube these days, mono color decks don’t happen very often. Thus, I’m just switching one very black intensive creature in for another.

The two Dauthi creatures are coming out as I’m not too enamored currently with shadow, as I’ve mentioned earlier. In their place I’m bringing in Tragic Slip and Gravecrawler. As a 2/1 for one black, Gravecrawler can stand on his own as an aggressive one drop. Obviously I’d be more happy with Gravecrawler if there were more zombies in my cube. However, he’s worth including on his vanilla stats alone so I’m not worrying myself with being able to abuse the ability to recur him. Tragic Slip is simply a solid, cheap removal spell that can either pick off chumps or can be used to blow out the big guys. It’s pretty easy in black to be able to make use of Slip’s morbid mode so it seems like a great addition to black decks.

Changes to black this time around are simple and are ones which I think are solid overall.